


Lazarus Redux

by gendzl



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel's True Form (Supernatural), Character Study, Episode Remix, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:28:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29631165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendzl/pseuds/gendzl
Summary: "Certain people—special people—can perceive my true visage. I thought you would be one of them."Lazarus Rising, shifted a bit to the left.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30





	Lazarus Redux

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up at 5:30 this morning with a Dean in my head that _saw_ Cas and I had to get it out in words.
> 
> Also, I hate hate hate hatehate!! that the end of this episode has Cas be like "You don't think you deserve to be saved" immediately followed by "We have work for you" in response to Dean asking why he did it, lol Dean's worth canonically stems from what he can do for other people. No thank you ❤️

Dean gasps his way out of the pine box they put him in, claws his way through dirt still loose from his burial and rises up into sunlight—sweet, glorious sunlight—and his first laugh is at the sight of the awkward, crooked cross someone stuck in the earth as a grave marker. Didn't even give him a headstone, fuck.

He notices the ring of downed trees next and his overwhelmed relief colors with a twinge of fear.

Whatever comes next, he should keep moving.

* * *

He ties his shirt around his waist after half a mile (sweet, glorious sunshine his ass), dirt turning to muddy streaks on his neck as he sweats out the little water still in his body.

There's a gas station at the crossroads, closed despite the hour. He wonders if it's Sunday, but that doesn't stop him from wrapping his shirt around his fist and breaking a window pane to get in. Religious folk are all about helping the needy, right?

The most recent newspaper (Pontiac, Illinois) is for Thursday, September 18, which makes it four months since he was buried; too long for his body to look…well. Not rotting.

He has no scars from the hellhounds. No scars at all, really, except for the a raw handprint given as a parting gift from whatever dragged him out of Hell. He won't miss the divots in his calf from the chunks of muscle torn out of him on a hunt at 15, or the knife wound on his hip that always ached in cold weather, but he takes a moment to grieve the loss of his happier childhood memories locked in scar tissue before he packs it away and keeps moving.

* * *

Candy bars, Hostess donuts, water, porn, cash register.

Static. The TV turns on, and then the radio, followed by the TV again, and then there's something else. It's a high-pitched ringing, and it's tangible. It's coming closer, but as Dean fumbles for the salt on the gas station shelves, it coalesces into something… _almost_. It's almost speech. Like the hearing equivalent of a word on the tip of his tongue, one he can very nearly grasp. A not-quite-known language.

It _hurts_. It shatters the windows and almost gets his eardrums, too, but he suddenly finds himself on the ground surrounded by glass shards and a ringing silence.

Something apologetic lingers in the air around him.

He shakes his ears out and goes to find a payphone.

* * *

Sam's number is out of service. Bobby's works, but he thinks someone is pranking him, so Dean hotwires the only car in the lot of the fill-up joint and makes his way there in person. It's a nine hour drive to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the money he got from the cash register means the car only just barely makes it.

Dean's exhausted, filthy, and smelling of grave dirt when he arrives on Bobby's front stoop the next morning only to get attacked by the only man he considers a father: a man convinced that he's one of the things they hunt.

It takes blood, salt, and holy water before he's pulled into a hug. The first scar he puts on this body is to prove himself.

"What do you remember?"

"Not much. Lights out, and then I come to six feet under." The lie is as much for himself as it is for Bobby.

The empty bottles of booze littering the study _(We had to bury you)_ remind Dean uncomfortably of John in the months after Mary died, when he was still too young to take care of Sammy by himself, too small to lift his father onto the couch.

When Bobby hints that Sam's the one who made a deal to get him out, Dean rolls the shoulder marred with the handprint and doubts.

* * *

They track Sam down in room 207 of a by-the-hour motel back in Pontiac. He pushes himself off tiger print wallpaper and gets in Sam's face, saying, "I didn't want to be saved like this." It comes out cracked and awful, but Sam didn't do it.

When he asks what it was like, Hell, Dean lies to him too. Meets his eyes dead on and says, "I don't remember a damn thing."

Start as you mean to go on.

* * *

Sam douched up Baby. Dean gets a sadistic joy out of tearing the iPod jack out of her center console.

* * *

Pamela touches the handprint on his arm and it hurts more than a hand on raw skin merits. The TV turns on almost in reaction to the touch, rather than her words.

The high-pitched whining is back, but Dean's the only one at the table that seems to hear it.

_Castiel._

He knows something awful is going to happen the moment before it does, and he tries to stop her from looking at it, tries to break the circle. He's too late.

She can't see.

* * *

He orders pie from a demon.

"Whatever it was, it wants me out," he says with a certainty coming from somewhere beneath his ribs. "And it's a lot stronger than you."

She smirks. "I'm gonna reach down your throat and rip out your lungs."

He slaps the demon, twice for good measure, and drops a ten on the table for the pie he didn't eat.

* * *

Television static wakes him from a dead sleep, surrounded by fruitless research on the motel bed. Sam's gone, Baby too. His gun is useless, but he points it at the door anyway. As though anything this powerful would even come through the _door_.

The mirror on the ceiling cracks and falls to the carpet in pieces, followed by the heavy frame. The windows blow in.

Dean passes out.

* * *

They cover the barn in protective talismans from every religion they know, and some they don't. Dean can feel that even this won't be enough.

They gather weapons of every sort. Dean is sure they're futile.

He thinks about the raw handprint on his arm and his body rebuilt from the ground up just like how he fixes Baby, and he understands that this is something different. Something new.

He doesn't want to kill it, not until they know, but Bobby does. Bobby sees his wife in every monster he hesitates to put down, so he doesn't ever let a little thing like doubt stop him.

They wait for what seems like hours. "You sure you did the ritual right?" Dean finally asks, and the roof of the barn starts clattering in answer, as though something was just waiting for him to break the silence.

Dean stands in the center of the barn as the thing that looks like a man but _isn't_ steps casually through the devil's trap inside the doors. And the next one, and the next, nothing they painted stopping it for even a moment. Dean's hands are secure around his gun, but they might as well be shoved deep into his pockets—he doesn't shoot even once. A hail of glass rains down on him from shattered lights and he doesn't flinch, doesn't try to run, just thinks, "Well, this body could use a few more scars."

He watches Bobby systematically run through each weapon they've laid out in preparation. The thing absorbs bullets like they're nothing. It deflects everything from rock salt to a tire iron, and when Bobby lunges for the demon knife Dean had been toying with while they waited—the only weapon Dean thinks might possibly do this creature harm—his hand grasps at empty air. He looks at Dean over the shoulder of the creature in front of him, betrayal in every line of his face.

The thing halts along with the barrage of attacks. It turns unerringly to look at Dean; it doesn't have to look around for him, it knows exactly where he'll be before it so much as turns its head.

It meets his eyes and cocks its head to one side.

In some other version of this moment, Dean might have asked a different question first, but here…something has changed. Shifted a bit to the left. Now, there's a prickle at the base of his spine and a surety, a glimpse of something _else_ just at the edges of his eyesight. So where another Dean might have asked who this was, this Dean reaches for a different question first.

"What are you?"

"I'm an angel of the Lord." It smiles, and Dean gets the brief impression of _teeth_ from somewhere behind his eye sockets, and then it reaches out and puts Bobby down with a single touch. "We need to talk, Dean. Alone."

* * *

He checks to make sure Bobby's still breathing, never turning his back on the bullet-riddled trenchcoat. Reassured by the presence of a strong pulse, he stands up from his crouch and says, "There's no such thing as an angel."

"This is your problem, Dean. You have no faith." The incessant flickering in the corner of his eye that he's been dutifully ignoring merges with the lightning that Castiel calls forth, and reality suddenly shifts enough that he sees it. Wings, six of them, spanning beyond the full width of the barn they're standing in. A complete being, spinning wheels and too many eyes, perched on the careful scaffolding of a human body.

Later, he'll compare the experience to staring at a Magic Eye book of 3D illusions with Sammy when he was twelve. Something is there, you know it is, and grasping the what of it isn't always instantaneous. But once you do spot whatever's hidden, you can't unsee it.

It hurts to look, but not in the way it hurt the psychic. He can't think of anything to call it other than holy.

"Why would an angel rescue me from Hell?"

"Good things do happen, Dean." Now that he's listening for it, Castiel's words carry an undercurrent of that other language. The one on the tip of Dean's hearing. It doesn't hurt to hear it anymore, and he wonders briefly if he can learn to understand it properly, without the English shoved to the foreground.

"What's the matter?" Castiel asks, squinting at him for a moment before his eyes (the blue ones in his vessel's head, the other ones elsewhere, all of them at once) clear again in understanding. "You don't think you deserve to be saved."

And this—this being, this creature of light, this angel the size of the Chrysler building that stuffed itself into a holy tax accountant just to talk to him properly—it looks at him like he's worth something. It _tells_ _him_ that he's worth something. He deserves to be saved. Not because of what he can do, no. Because of who he is.

He's Dean Winchester. And maybe, just this once, that's enough.


End file.
